Words by Contributing Humans

Brian Oliu on Kanye West:

And so, we believe his ire in “All of the Lights” when he tells the story of a jealous lover who ruins his family over horns that sound lifted from Rocky and the sexy Bahamian-warble of Rihanna, because that’s the only way we would listen, and that is the only way that we understand.  Sitting in your room all bummed out and listening to The National is so played out, so trite, so cliché—it just doesn’t register these days.  My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy is like crying at your own birthday party amongst cake, a packed dance floor, and all of your friends.  It is exclamation points and CAPS LOCK in your status updates, thirty-five tweets in two hours.  It is not quiet, and it is not meant to be, nor should it be.

Roxane Gay, "Beautiful Babette, the Wondering Nymphette":

Babette was a beautiful woman with a beautiful, old-fashioned name. Her mother, who never traveled beyond the county line for most of her life, loved the idea of France and words that ended in ette like laundrette, serviette, toilette, and marionette. For most of her life, Babette listened to her mother’s stories about a place she had never seen. She determined, like most daughters are wont to do, that she would never be like her mother. She would go to France, she would leave their small rural town where no one could properly pronounce or spell her name, where they only knew her as the head majorette whose mother worked at the luncheonette on Main Street.

Poems by Robert Alan Wendeborn.

Poems by friend of the blog Carrie Murphy.

Brian Oliu, "someone.exe":

There is always a fear of no one, the yelling voices after cars failing to start on late evenings, the noise muffled through glass doors and windows, and then, nothing, no one except an anonymous log-in meant to get and put and not to synchronize, no way to write new things or to even acknowledge existence beyond a time stamp filed into a log with a dot in front of the filename, something invisible. This is the fear that draws me to who I am supposed to be, a person without a home, a transitory voice which could be anywhere, at the end of a road where no one lives anymore or a field where there is no commentary except that of the contrast between the stalks and sky.

Roxanne Carter has a book coming out next year with Jaded Ibis Press! I should have known but somehow missed this. Congrats to all.